#benriddle

so tired you stop wanting what you've always wanted: to be loved. instead, you compromise, accept booty calls from boys in sweatpants sleeping on empty mattresses on dusty floors. you, baby doll, try to take their broke and fill yourself with it; take your empty and try to fill it with pain, with falling asleep to familiar voices, to reruns of old shows, old smiles, old dreams of owning an apartment and filling it with trinkets you made of your love. with these little prayers you made of plants to home, you pray

The first time I am caught stealing it is from an American Apparel, I pretend

I am on the way in, leave banned but triumphant, possess now a shirt with an

eagle on it. There is a holiness to praying for forgiveness, learning; to penitence.

There is a self-prescribed divinity to not, to taking oil drum day dreams and making,

breaking home out of houses wherever you want; autofictious arrogance, and I,

I feel like I'm saying a lot out loud, and nobody's listening not even me.

There's blood in my mouth from the grind, the beat, but it's better than biting my tongue,

cutting myself on my teeth. I'm writing poetry on post it notes,

postcard scrawl, the receipt rolls of sacrament halls, shopping docket

coupons buy one get one free, buy ten have your soul back;

my spirit is burning at a stake inside of me held there by hands I made myself

the fire starts inside of me, I watch as it comes out, watch it touch these flimsy

yellow paper walls where Wilde wrote Gothic and for a moment, I want

I want to watch it all burn, because if the bar burns down, then maybe

the stories disappear, and I disappear; I'm feeling homesick for a time I could say

I love you, to say I love you, to say I am sorry for the space between us, now

for the times you put your hands on my chest and burned them; my ribcage turned

boilerroom, smoking lounge caught fire when I left the light on, let shame

watch our shadow figures fuck; for when my inner child caught frying pan handle from

stove. We catch fire in the living room, held up by hands inside of me. The smoke

exhales, we breathe deeply of one another; start to drown. There,

we made a home on the sea floor, but some people can only hold their breath

for so long before they need to scream, ask for space; need to see

mountains carve up night sky, while I dream of writing wills on the walls Atlantis,

the things I would show you there, I write on yellow wallpaper, burn them up.

I don't write for other people anymore. The last time I stole, I took a book

from a shop in a part of town I can't afford. It was a copy of Howl,

I wrote in it, put it back. Don't believe what they tell you, I tell the person after me.

This was never ours, this language, you don't have to sound like they do.

the other night, i asked for a prompt and some angel sent me a cool one that I'll post a poem to later (almost done, i promise)

but also and in the meantime and hi, i have been working SO MUCH lately and because some life that happened i had to do one more semester of uni (for this degree, there may be more and i resetve the right to complain about them)

but the thing is that writing keeps me sane, more, it makes me happy, and when i get in my own head i love some prompts

if you have prompts, i would love to write to them + please send them to me. hi, I would love that

xoxo ben reedle

@midnightxmasquerade made me watch Like Minds, and asked me to write a response poem. This was the result.  Heavens falling; a necessary evil bleeding memories like heresy like loving you more than God.

Pull me apart like some living autopsy, some dissection; cup my heart in your hands let it beat for you, let it know;

"I see you," I want you to whisper to it, as I scream hung from fish-hooks and barbed wire from

the ceiling and the Fates. Perform me for these old crones and their laughter;

let me be a story blood-flecked on your nails, an apology no one asked for, a memory.

Love is made of heartbeats, I think, or measured in them; by time, by pumps perhaps, or

the sheer volume of blood we breathe. Perhaps love is all of them, perhaps as we love, make love

or fall, our heartbeats echo echo against one another like Doppler riding someone in an elevator;

the closer we come to the edge, the further we are from understanding. Perhaps falling is all that matters,

we speak of orbit, talk to children about globes or mobiles, but really the planet is falling,

falling perfectly, screaming across the horizon so it is never lost, always

kept just close enough to Helios that the sun can catch us, if Ra wants to.

Love is the same, I think, it is falling, falling and screaming letting our echoes hang in the void

as poetry, scrawled across blogs and tumblr and twitter, the most deviant of art

written in Plato's cave and abandoned. Perhaps that is why God abandoned us; He ran away with some floozy,

or perhaps he started writing poetry over poetry over the echoes of poetry, perhaps

He was screaming and poetry couldn't catch Him, so He fell. Perhaps Lucifer is less an idea than

an after photo. Imagine before and after photos of love; the exuberance, the hope. The betrayal,

not by a lover, necessarily, but by your idea of love, your expectations. Hope is a fickle bitch, tricking you

into living just so you can die. Death is just an echo; it can only come to the living like

echoes only come to the living sounds, so strange that we are become echoes of one another;

like we are two minds speaking, or listening to voices speak from the flames, the fire

alone with us in the cave, and we are warm. There are few things more Faustian than falling in love,

the heliocentric making someone the centre of your universe,

in exchange for being happy, for a little while. The story is always the same; eventually

one of us falls too far. One of us suddenly free of gravity, of orbit; of love,

becoming then only a voice. I have loved many voices, but yours now, the only sound I care

ringing, echoing echoing like I am trying to scream your voice; like

I am trying to speak it, only I am falling from the edge of an earth, held

back by fish-hooks, barbed wire, humanity. The Fates cackle; place my heavy heart

on the scales of Anubis, but before you do, please whisper "I see you, I know you;